"You shouldn't
smoke, mister. Mama says that it's bad for you. You get cancer and
then you die!"

He ignored the child's
warning, merely tilting his head back and letting the smoke slide out
of his mouth and flared nostrils.

"Hey, mister! Did you
hear what I said? Smoking is bad for you!"

The little boy that
Hillel had rescued weeks ago had now become like a second shadow to
him; always following him around and asking him questions a mile a
minute and without stopping. From what Hillel could see, the boy's
mother was always working and so she was forced to just leave him and
come back later to pick him up again, using Hillel as a kind of free
babysitter.

The boy was an endless
fountain of information about his life and he in fact lifted his
shirt up once to show Hillel a thin scar that ran down his stomach.

"My daddy gave this
to me. He got mad and hit me and mama a lot."

Hillel had a mental
flash of the boy's father coming to the park to cause troubles for
them all and if he could; the man would have shuddered.

As he slipped the
cigarette back into his mouth, he suddenly heard the boy whimpering,
and with an arched eyebrow, Hillel looked down and found him nearly
in tears.

"I don't want you
to die!" the boy wept and with an inward sigh, Hillel took the
cigarette out and flicked it away. He then took out his pack and he
crushed it in one hand before holding it over the rubbish bin,
pausing before looking back at the boy.

When he smiled and
nodded, Hillel let it go and merely folded his hands in his lap and
went back to staring at the children playing on the play set.

The boy hugged him
around his middle and Hillel took his eyes off of the other children
as he looked down at him in surprise, raising his eyebrows.

"I love you, mister!"

Hillel was not sure
what emotion he was feeling in his chest, but if he could speak, he
would have said it was love for the little boy that reminded him of
his own long dead son.

But he could not speak
and so the feeling went unnamed.

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